And it plays a very important role. At one point several years ago I attended a conference with one of the biggest Silicon Valley venture capitalists. This was someone heavily invested in cutting-edge technology. We were talking about predicting the future, which is essentially his business, as he bets hundreds of millions on the success of certain technologies. He is not at all religious, so you can imagine how surprised I was when he told me, “In the future, the people who are going to have a leg up on us are the people who have faith. If they have God in their life, they will find meaning in their faith. And so when they lose their job or something bad happens in their life, they will have their faith to rely on that somehow it will all work out.”
I’ve thought about that. And I’ve wondered, what do any of us believe in that’s bigger than ourselves? What defines us? It occurred to me that many Americans had God in their lives without knowing it; we’ve just changed His name. We find Him in our cars, our job, our house, fame, sex, the environment, political parties—whatever it is that regulates us and gives us permission to act. For me, it was my car. Back in the 1980s, I was successful as a radio show host in that I was able to buy a Mercedes. That car represented everything I had worked for. I loved it; it was the material embodiment of my success. My father loved it, too; he’d never owned a new car in his life, and the fact that his son could afford a Mercedes had real meaning to him. But when my life collapsed, the Mercedes had to go. I will never forget the feeling of loss, that emptiness inside, as I watched that car being towed down the block. That was me disappearing into the distance. I had allowed that car to define me. Losing it felt like I was losing everything that mattered in my life, like I was losing myself. I was left without any sense of who I was, and there is nothing more empty than that.
My father always said that the two most powerful words in any tongue are I AM. Because what you put after those words is how you see yourself; what you see, what you speak, will become what you are. It is the creative power of God. If you say I AM worthy, or I AM worthless, or I AM capable, or I AM too dumb to figure it out, that is the you and the reality that you will create.
This is something I actually think about often. How do I answer that question today? I AM . . . what? The answer changes. And as a result I know that I am changing. Try it yourself; you’ll see what an incredibly complex mix of emotions, ideas, thoughts, moods, needs, and wants we all are. What have you created for yourself? I have spent too long saying I AM outraged.
I AM finding new ideas and new people to connect with on a whole different level.
The only thing that doesn’t change for me is my faith. That’s there all the time. Resolute, solid. My bulwark. So, when I talk about the importance of faith in giving up your addiction to outrage, I’m writing from my own experience. I didn’t know when I started on this path that I would reach this point. But fulfilling the first and second steps, admitting I was powerless over my addiction and believing that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity, required more than just surrendering to the unknown. That possibility was scary. That’s when I came to understand the power of faith for me to rely on—and then rebuild on.
People don’t just become addicts. It’s not like making a wrong turn and getting caught on a backwoods road. It’s a path you follow to fill a need, whatever it might be, inside you. Whatever you are running from, the addiction helps you get away. I don’t know anyone who can just give it up without some sort of replacement. I had no idea what that might be, but I had faith that I would be led to it, that I would find it, and that somehow I would be okay.
Believe me, there were a lot of times when I doubted that. A lot of times when I came close to having a drink. That was also true when I realized I was causing dissension and outrage and had to stop. I questioned whether I was capable of giving up what I had in exchange for . . . for something, I didn’t know what, that would be better. When I started on this path I had no way of knowing I would reach this place. The more faith I had that there was something waiting for me once I escaped my addiction, the easier it became.
Coming to my faith was a journey for me. Growing up as a Catholic, I was greatly puzzled by what I was told were matters of faith. I know many great Catholics, and in no way should my personal experiences reflect on them or the Catholic faith. I had to believe because I was told to believe. And if I didn’t believe, oh boy, I was surely going to spend eternity burning in hell. That didn’t have much appeal to me. I am not good with the heat. I live in Texas; I will not do well in hell. But when I thought about the precepts of my religion, they made little sense to me. Did Gandhi go to hell because he wasn’t a good Catholic? Why did babies have to go a place called Purgatory? If I dared question any of this, they told me I was committing a sin called blasphemy. How could trying to understand my religion be considered a bad thing?
Well, I didn’t have faith that these people, who were so certain, knew a whole lot more than I did. In fact, the whole concept of an all-encompassing God seemed pretty strange to me. As my father had warned me, in addition to worshipping different Gods, everybody seemed to have their own definition of God. He was in the air and in the trees, blah, blah, blah. I can see the appeal, but it still was too vague to me. I sort of muddled along for a long time, not so much wrestling with the question as ignoring it. Religion didn’t play an important role in my life at that time. Then in the mid-1990s I read a letter that Thomas Jefferson had written to his nephew, Peter Carr. “Fix reason firmly in her seat,” he wrote, “and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there is one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”
Question with boldness! I liked that; that thought resonated with me. Question with boldness. That was a game changer for me. Right around the same time, I was reading Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. In that book he used the scientific method as a way of encouraging and even teaching people how to think critically. I didn’t even consider myself a Catholic any longer, but when he began criticizing the Church, I became enraged. It shocked me. I literally threw the book onto the bed.
And then I picked it up and continued reading. It forced me to at least consider the concept of God. I began reading a great variety of opinion, trying to unravel my own feelings. I read everything I could find, from Billy Graham to the I Ching. I read about other religions, remembering my father telling me that no single religion has the answers, that there is truth in a lot of religion. “God’s not just passing it out to one group,” he said. And what I found was that there were some universal beliefs: that all of the great religions seem to agree on certain broad principles. There was no way they heard that from each other; they all arrived at those points separately, so there was a good chance of their being true.
Among those truths is that there are natural laws, and many of them are beyond our understanding. The first, I believe, is an understanding by all living things that they are alive. A fly, for example, has no knowledge. It doesn’t know there is a universe or an earth, it isn’t aware that it exists, and yet when we try to swat it, somehow it senses danger to its existence and flees. Somehow a fly knows it has to protect its life. There is some internal alarm that goes off. Flowers and plants have developed defense systems to fight off the predators that would kill them. Now suppose you go into a cave and try to hug cute little bear cubs, and Mama bear rips you to shreds. No one blames the bear; instead we agree that you’re as dumb as a box of rocks.
It seems to me that that is nature telling us we have a right to defend ourselves. Okay, I get it—we all have a right to life and self-defense.
Also, I began to understand that the broad purpose of all religions is to provide some sense of moral guidance. The different religions propose different systems; that makes sense, they all were created by men with their own agendas, but all of them lay down some rules. The point is that man has always felt a need
for some power greater than himself to provide a framework by which to live with other people. This isn’t some new concept; every civilization has had its God or many Gods, and while the rules differed, they all provided some structure for a society.
And among the other universal concepts that emerged from my research was that even though few ever claimed to have seen God, they believed He existed. They accepted the mysteries of the universe as evidence of that. Thunder meant God was angry. Abundance meant He was pleased. The fact that they couldn’t prove His existence didn’t make any difference; they had faith.
Faith is fundamental to life, I believe. My wife appeared in my life at the very moment I was about to start drinking again. I challenged God to send me a message if He wanted me to stay sober, but there was some bitterness in that. I had stopped drinking but didn’t seem to be getting the rewards I had believed would come with that. Not only wasn’t my life better, it was a lot worse. I’d lost everything that mattered to me. Then I met this wonderful woman who just kept appearing in my life. Many people would think the fact that our paths crossed several times in a brief period of time was a coincidence, but others would say it was design. Whatever it was, I fell in love with her, and after spending more than a year together I asked her to marry me. She had lifted the darkness from my spirit, and I expected her to immediately agree.
“No,” she said.
What? “Are you kidding me? Why?”
At that point there were some pretty good reasons for her to turn me down. I was working as a disc jockey for a small salary, and most of that was going for alimony and child support. I was ten years older than she was, and my prospects weren’t that great. But none of that was the reason she turned me down. “Because we don’t have God in common,” she said, “and without God, we won’t make it.”
But I believed in God, I told her. The truth is I believed in some concept of what might be called God, if you stretched it, but I didn’t have an active faith. I summed it up as “The church just doesn’t work for me.”
We decided to embark on our church tour. We went religion shopping, and I loved it. We dipped into a smorgasbord of different religions and denominations. My disappointment as a Christian was my belief that somewhere it had derailed; too often it was wonderful preaching about principles we weren’t living. I didn’t want to listen to a preacher anymore; I wanted to see people whose lives had been changed. I wanted to see happy families, spiritual, prosperous people who were going through the same turmoil as everyone else but had it together—not Facebook together but really together. Because I wanted to incorporate that into my life.
Tania and I put no restrictions on our quest. One Saturday, for example, we went to a synagogue. I didn’t understand a word of the service, but I loved it. We spent several months soul searching. And the result was that I discovered myself.
One day I got a call from my friend Pat, who had heard what I was doing and invited me to his church. I turned him down. I wasn’t going to be a Mormon. Those people are nuts! “Oh,” he said, “I thought you were honestly looking for the truth. I didn’t know you were cutting out the things you didn’t want to do.”
Okay, I agreed to attend a Sunday service. When he told me it was three hours long, I said, “STRRIIIIIIKKKKKEEE ONE! Nope. You get one hour, just like the other faiths.”
When we walked in we were welcomed. A little too strong, I thought. By a guy who was just too happy to see us. Okay, Plastic Man, turn that down a notch. Then, because my friend called his friends and told them I would sneak out early, we got trapped there. In the second hour we were allowed to ask questions. I knew I had them. It was the old tried-and-true get-out-of-Jesus-talk-free card. I raised my hand and whispered to Tania, “We’re going to be in the parking lot in five minutes.”
“Don’t embarrass me,” she warned.
“I have an honest question,” I said when called upon. “Where’s Gandhi?” One of my biggest problems with other religions was the belief that anyone who did not follow their beliefs ended up in hell. Gandhi knew about Jesus and rejected Him. I couldn’t imagine anyone believing that a deity would tell one of the greatest men in history, “Yeah, did a lot of good, but you didn’t join the right church, so it sucks to be you.” And then he would be sentenced to eternal flames.
“Well,” came the answer, “we don’t know, but he’s in heaven.”
We stayed through the entire service. We decided to keep going until they said something that pissed me off. The person who invited us made me angrier and angrier because he insisted on being loving. We met his family. They were just as nice as he was. Behind his back I began referring to him as “Mr. Plastic Man and his amazing plastic family.” And every time I said that, Tania would roll her eyes. This went on for about eight months. One week he began discussing the biblical concept of Zion.
Zion is the utopia, a place where there are no needs, no wants. The highest goal of man, I believe, is to reach that place. It seems counterintuitive that a staunch conservative believes that our highest goal sounds rather Marxist. But it actually should be everyone’s goal and desire. The problem with socialism isn’t the utopian desire, it is how it is achieved. “How do we get there?” he asked. “How do we build that?” Some other members of the congregation offered opinions. Finally he looked directly at me, and with tears welling in his eyes, he explained, “We have to find a way to love one another. I have to be able to find love for you—even though I don’t know you. I may not even like you, I may not like the things you do, but I know who you are. You’re my brother. You’re my sister. And therefore, I love you.”
It was clear that his words came from his heart. So much for Plastic Man; he was the most genuine man I’d ever met. Somehow, he had found a way to connect to that part of his heart. I sat for a long time, even after most other people had left; there was a warmth in my chest, the kind of warmth and excitement I’d felt when I fell in love for the first time. It felt like anything was possible. I thought, “I don’t care if I have to drink chicken blood—that man found love. I want to be like him; I’m in.”
I could have been stubborn and said, “You know, I don’t know about this whole three-hour church thing.” But what mattered to me was the truth of the fruit. A bad tree cannot bear good fruit. This was good, and I wanted this fruit. I knew, I just knew, “This will change my life.” And it has, deeply and profoundly. “Utopia” does not come from a government or a church. No system that imposes by force “acts of charity” through redistributive taxes or nonvoluntary tithing will create utopia. It comes only from a change of heart. It has mine. It is why I and so many of my listeners were on the border three years ago, even when it “hurt our side.” Doing the wrong thing is never right, and doing the right thing is never wrong. That simple truth seems to be harder and harder to live by with each passing day.
Now, I don’t know how much of what any religion preaches or promises is true, and we won’t know until we get there—or don’t. Personally I am keeping my options open. God could be a space octopus, although that’s not likely. I have a deal with many of my Jewish friends: When we die, we will ask, has the messiah come? If God says yes, I will vouch for you; if he says “NO,” you vouch for me. I also have a deal with my atheist friends: Let’s be really good people and friends, because if you are right, this may be it; and if I am right, when you get there I am going to turn out all the lights and pretend we’re not home like on Halloween. But here’s what I do know: That feeling I get inside when I give myself up to the possibilities is real. I don’t care if it’s my mind playing tricks on me—that feeling is real. And wonderful.
Something else happened, too; I changed. People can speculate on the reasons for that. I believe it was what Christians call “the atonement,” but for the purposes of this book, what is important is that profound change can and did happen. Over time, I became a better man. I was no longer the guy I used to be. I didn’t miss him, either.
After I embraced faith, I didn’t su
ddenly become a zealot; I didn’t stop questioning the broadest concepts or suddenly accept every claim as true. But I did change. I found what I didn’t even know I had been looking for; an inner peace. Maybe it was there all the time and I needed to give it room to grow, or maybe it was new, but it was there.
I had real evidence of that. When I was drinking, I alienated some people close to me. Among them was a relative with whom I had been close. He felt that I had treated him poorly. It had not been my intention to do that, but that’s what alcoholism can do. This was a person who in the past I had done quite a bit for, but at the low point of my life, when I was getting a divorce and living in what was essentially a studio apartment, he did just the opposite. He turned on me. After that I saw him only at family events. We were thrown together at a celebration, the wedding of a mutual relative. As I was standing on the side watching my daughter dancing, he came up to me from behind, put me in a neck lock, and said, “Do you know what a fucking bad dad you are? You’re the worst dad in the world.” As I was watching my daughter dancing. He did some other things that really made me furious. If he hadn’t been a relative . . .
After Tania and I married, we would be at events and he kept his distance. He said some really nasty and untrue things about me, but what really bothered me were the things he said about Tania. I wanted to confront him, but she wouldn’t let me. Instead, after one event I drove home in a rage. I was twisted inside; I was holding the steering wheel so tightly my knuckles literally were white. “Leave it alone,” she told me, “it doesn’t make any difference.” I couldn’t, though—I just couldn’t. This is how angry I was: We left the event and drove almost three hours—in the wrong direction. We went north instead of south.